Everybody is speculating about what the “non-domestically paid fee for a new service” is. Isn’t it blindingly obvious?
All those decades of waiting in the wings and the best he can come up with is selling passports to people who are burdened with a bad one.
Times of Malta reports on the government’s draft budget plan:
“The main fiscal consolidation measures for 2014 include the 2006 pension reform initiatives, a number of indirect tax measures to be announced in the budget, a measure introducing a non-domestically paid fee for a new service, and measures which restrict recruitment in the public sector,” the Draft Budgetary Plan says.
It’s blindingly obvious what the supposedly enigmatic bit I’ve highlighted in bold is: the sale of passports. How tragic. I mean, really, how tragic. We have gone from a proper government which built long-term, to one which announces that its “main fiscal consolidation measures for 2014” include selling passports for hard cash.
Fancy, obscurantist descriptions just don’t cut it.
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Someone who watched Kalamita this week told me that this sale of passports was discussed on one of its programmes.
The genius that Alfred Zammit is, explained the whole thing like this:
“Now if someone like Ronaldo, for example, would want to play with the Malta team, wouldn’t you sell him a passport, for the good of Malta?”
To which Manuel quickly replied:
“It is all for the sake of investment and the good of the country. What’s all the fuss about? Everybody does it.”
No wonder their audience is so gullible.
Really goes to show that Labour has absolutely no idea how to achieve economic growth. I am not smelling the coffee but I am definitely smelling meltdown in a couple of years.
Oh look, the one who’s whining that negative figures taking over statistics are ‘distortions by the PN’.
Mintoff economics. Hallina, Profs.
Guess one of the indirect taxes will be on purchases made online with Visa/Mastercard, etc.
That’s exactly what I thought.
http://www.maltarightnow.com/?module=news&at=%26%23294%3Baddiema+tal%2DST+MicroElectronics+fuq+forced+leave&t=a&aid=99851591&cid=19
Something’s not right, and they couldn’t care less.
Apparently, Finance Minister and Mintoffianomics Professor Sigg Luna is afraid to use the words “Cash proceeds from the sale of Maltese and EU Passports and Citizenship.”
But let us be clear. If the Minister has included a line item for “cash from sale of passports” in the budget which he presented to the EU, then the EU Commission should seriously question this line item in the budget. Not only because the Minister is selling EU citizenship and the EU is getting nothing in return, but because the government has promised that it will be setting aside the money from the sale of passports for specific uses. So the Minister cannot spend those funds in his budget unless he is using them for those specific uses.
Now don’t tell me that Muscat is going to use them for the “Youth Guarantee” scheme, because the European Socialists, who had created that guarantee scheme (about which I never heard again) had claimed that there were EU Social Funds for this purpose.
Which brings up another question: For Sigg Luna to include the sale of passports as part of the government’s planned revenue for 2014, he must have a list of committed buyers planning to buy a Maltese passport, I would suspect.
Joseph has already alluded to sales in 2014 would amount to 30 million euro. Where did he get the figure from? Thin air?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/czech-sculpture_n_4135547.html
Iz-zokk kemm hu bravu.
I expected Muscat to be ready to sell his soul if this was needed – after all, he himself had told us that for him “the end justifies the means”.
But I never expected a professor of economics to raise money by selling his country’s passports.
Had Scicuna adopted a similar system to Austria’s, this would have been acceptable, but copying Caribbean islands with simple economies is outrageous.
Shame on him.
You just have to wonder how Muscat would have filled this hole in our finances if he had won his hard fought battle to keep us out of the EU thus rendering his passport sale scheme a non starter.
We, the Maltese, deserve no better than this crap government. How can it be that so many people did not see all this coming their way before last March election?
The writing was on the wall. Labour always fails Malta.
“Measures which restrict recruitment in the public sector”!! What hypocrites! First they employ/reward with our taxes every Tom, Dick and Harry who expressed his support for them and now they want to limit recruitment. Should have thought of that last March
“…measures which restrict recruitment in the public sector,” Are the new restrictions being proposed, firstly you have to be labour, secondly you have to say ÿes sir to the head chief of staff at opm, thirdly you need to promise them your vote for life?
The indirect tax measures they’re speaking about is a tax on fast foods and further taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. That’s it. We blew their top. Their secrets are uncovered.
What about restricting recruitment in the public sector? Should we laugh or cry? Have they already given everyone they owe a favour to, a well paid job?
“measures which restrict recruitment in the public sector,” – they would have recruited all their friends by then.
If it were up to Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, we, the citizens of Malta, would not have joined the EU to become full EU citizens and would not now have an EU passport.
Were Malta to have entered into a partnership agreement with the EU instead, as advised by Joseph Muscat, and were we still not full EU citizens, would Joseph Muscat, Edward Scicluna and Manwel Mallia be selling to us EU passports for the price of Euro 650,000 each for those of us wishing to become EU citizens?
Maybe that’s why Joseph Muscat and Labour did not want us to join the EU, then?